“So everyone knows about Obadiah now?” Ysabeau asked her grandson.
“Everybody except Phoebe,” Marcus replied.
“What?” Agatha was stunned. “Marcus. How could you keep this from her?”
“I tried to tell her. Loads of times.” Marcus sounded miserable. “But Phoebe didn’t want me to tell her about my past. She wanted to discover it for herself—through my blood.”
“Bloodlore is even more unreliable than a vampire’s memories,” Ysabeau said. She shook her head. “You should not have let her dissuade you, Marcus. You knew better. You followed your heart, and not your head.”
“I was respecting her wishes!” Marcus retorted. “You told me to listen to her, Grand-mère. I was following your advice.”
“Part of growing older and wiser is learning which advice to follow and which to ignore.” Ysabeau sipped her champagne, her eyes glittering. My mother-in-law was up to something, but I knew better than to try to ferret it out. Instead, I changed the subject.
“What’s a ‘true father,’ Marcus?” Vampire family vocabulary could be confusing, and I wanted to be sure I had it right. “You mentioned it earlier. Obadiah was your birth father—is that the same thing, in vampire terms?”
“No.” The colored threads around Marcus were getting darker, the purple and indigo now almost black. “It has nothing to do with vampires. A true father is the man who teaches what you need to know about the world and how to survive in it. Joshua and Zeb were truer fathers to me than Obadiah. So was Tom.”
“I found some letters online about the summer of 1776 and the lifting of the inoculation ban in Massachusetts,” I said, determined to find a safer topic of conversation than fathers and sons. “Everything you remember fits into what I discovered. Washington and Congress were panicked at the thought that an epidemic would wipe out the entire army.”
“Their fears were justified,” Marcus replied. “When I finally reached Washington and the army, it was early November. The battles were drawing to a close for the year, but fatalities were destined to increase when the fighting stopped and the army went into their winter camp. Back then, peace was more deadly to the army than war.”
“Contagion,” I said. “Of course. Smallpox would spread like wildfire in a crowded encampment.”
“Discipline was a problem, too,” Marcus said. “Nobody followed orders, unless Washington himself gave them. And I wasn’t the only young man who’d run away from home seeking adventure. For every runaway who enlisted, though, it seemed that two men deserted. There was so much coming and going that nobody could keep track of who was there and who wasn’t, or which regiment you belonged to, or where you’d come from.”
“Did you go to Albany, like Joshua suggested?” I asked.
“Yes,” Marcus said, “but the army wasn’t there. They’d gone east, to Manhattan and Long Island.”
“So that’s when you joined the medical corps.” I was eager to put together the fragments of what I knew.
“Not quite. First, I joined up with a company of gunners. I had been traveling at night for more than a month. I was alone, spooked like a newborn colt whenever anybody spoke to me, and utterly convinced I would be caught and hauled back to Massachusetts to answer for my father’s death,” Marcus explained. “The Philadelphia Associators took me in without any questions. It was my first rebirth.”
But not his last.
“I had a new father—Lieutenant Cuthbert—and brothers instead of sisters. I even had a new mother of sorts.” Marcus shook his head. “German Gerty. Lord, I haven’t thought of her for decades. And Mrs. Otto. Christ, she was formidable.”
Marcus’s expression darkened.
“But there were still so many rules, and so much death. And precious little freedom,” he continued, before falling silent.
“Then what happened?” I prompted.
“Then I met Matthew,” Marcus said simply.
Washington Papers, United States National Archives George Washington to Dr. William Shippen Jr.
Morristown, New Jersey
6 February 1777
Dear Sir:
Finding the Small pox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our Army, I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated. This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy. . . . If the business is immediately begun and favoured with the common success, I would fain hope they will be soon fit for duty, and that in a short space of time we shall have an Army not subject to this the greatest of all calamities that can befall it when taken in the natural way.